Author: Jaleel Plus Six, BlockBeats

“Now, let me say this, I am the richest and most cash-flow-rich post-00s on Zhihu, which can be verified. Does anyone oppose?”

This was Vida's somewhat provocative self-introduction, where he claimed to be the current richest post-00s on Zhihu, with at least 7 million US dollars in spare cash (approximately RMB 51 million) due to his fast trading speed and excessively profitable gains, having received investigation notices from Binance's risk control department five times.

Upon seeing this, many people would think this is another attention-seeking statement from a Zhihu show-off warrior. But what if all of this is true?

On November 11th, Binance listed two low-market-cap tokens, ACT and PNUT. According to the on-chain data monitoring platform LookIntoChain, just 2 seconds after Binance announced the listing of ACT, an address rapidly bought 10.9 million ACT tokens for $320,000. After the rapid rise in ACT's price, the profit from this investment quickly surged to $3.4 million (approximately RMB 24 million).

The purchase from this address even occurred a full 7 seconds before the official Chinese announcement of the token listing on Binance, showcasing an extremely fast buy speed and huge profit, leading some users to immediately speculate about insider trading and front-running.

Just as the discussion was escalating, the "Formula News" team released a statement claiming ownership of this address. Their trading relied on the English announcement, which was 7 seconds earlier than the Chinese one. The speed of this transaction was due to the precision and speed of programmatic news trading, with Vida being the mastermind behind it.

For Vida, the "post-00s rich second generation," $3 million, and RMB 21 million, only took 2 seconds.

After a glorious victory, Vida was hailed by netizens as the strongest algorithmic trading god in this bull market cycle. When answering questions from netizens, Vida himself mentioned that his net worth has now approached RMB 130 million.

Vida's rapid rise to fame has attracted countless people's attention. Not only because of his speed in accumulating wealth and his astounding trading abilities but also because of his background, growth experiences, and investment philosophy, which are quite legendary From Vida's subjective content on his Zhihu account and public information, BlockBeats tries to piece together the rise of this post-00s genius trader.

IQ 70, Perennial Bottom Performer

Vida's life starting point is far from what is now dubbed by netizens as "genius trader."

He was born in 2000 to a middle-class family in Jiangsu, where living conditions were not difficult, but his academic record was somewhat concerning.

Starting from primary school and junior high, Vida's foundation in science was very weak, with his math grades consistently at the bottom of the class. In addition, scoring a 70 on an IQ test further solidified his teachers' and classmates' impression of him as a "dullard."

In China's public education system, which prioritizes science over liberal arts, such performance made it difficult for him to excel. "If I continued to stay in public school, I would even be inferior to the town's cram school students. At least they can do the drills, while I can't do anything," he said.

During the high school entrance exam, Vida handed in a perfunctory answer sheet, scoring only 194 points, marking his complete break from traditional education. In hindsight, Vida was very grateful that he did not remain in the public education system but instead found his strengths and maximized their value.

Vida's exceptional talent in languages, especially his outstanding English proficiency, was particularly notable. The potential suppressed in the traditional educational system was finally unleashed when he entered an international high school.

"My strength lies in lateral thinking, rich imagination, and a knack for spotting business opportunities," Vida described himself this way. He found that he excelled in seizing information asymmetry between individuals in a free and relaxed environment, turning this "financial intelligence" into the core gene of his future success.

A significant part of Vida's transformation is credited to his family education. Vida's father played a significant role in his enlightenment. Since 1996, Vida's father entered the Chinese stock market, following the value investment philosophy of Buffett and also having his unique method of investing in the Chinese stock market. Avoiding the peaks of 2007 and 2015, buying houses in 2000, 2008, and 2015, Vida's father transitioned from a foreign enterprise procurement manager to an early retiree who often enjoys leisure activities in the mountains and waters through his investments.

At 16, His First Pot of Gold

This realization led Vida to understand that the newest speculative business studies would never be taught in school. Rather, one needed to engage in business personally and experience the fluctuations of the financial market to learn from it. If one's pursuit is money, then studying and practicing speculation is far more effective than just burying one's head in books.

“Spending a few years learning and practicing speculation may be more effective than studying for 100 years.”

Therefore, he rarely reads books, but he is constantly on Twitter and YouTube, mingling in a high-caliber English community with an average per capita asset exceeding 2 million US dollars, only paying attention to the statements of the most outstanding traders, drawing experience and wisdom from them. He prefers to describe himself as a “Grassroots General”: “I am like Li Yunlong, a general born in the grasslands. I haven’t read many military classics, but I know how to fight in the business world.”

In 2015, at the age of 16, Vida first attempted to put his theory into practice. He engaged in low-asset arbitrage taking advantage of information asymmetry and accumulated his first pot of gold of 1 million RMB in less than four years.

Low-asset, low-cost, high-efficiency arbitrage has always been his core strategy. He profits from the information asymmetry between markets and individuals. This model is not only low-cost and efficient but also extremely fault-tolerant. He admits that the success rate of the ideas he tries is only 10% to 20%, but the investment in each idea will not exceed 1% of the total assets. This low-cost trial-and-error mode allows him to take risks boldly, even if he fails, it will not cause significant harm, but once successful, the return is often several times or even tens of times.

At that stage, his trading intuition and market sensitivity began to show their edge when his peers were still anxious about exams. This first pot of gold has become his capital accumulation and a source of confidence, also serving as the seed capital for his later macro investment stage.

Around 2018, Vida did not go through the college entrance examination but chose to enter an overseas university with a 3+1 program.

There, he met peers from around the world and set his sights on a larger market—macro investment. He began to make investment decisions based on his precise judgment of the macroeconomy and market trends. At this stage, his wealth grew from 1 million to 7 million RMB.

However, he soon realized that the traditional manual trading method could no longer meet his needs. The market changes rapidly, and relying solely on intuition and manual operation makes it difficult to stay ahead in a competitive environment. Therefore, Vida began to study quantitative trading, exploring how to automate and refine his trading pattern using programs and algorithms.

More Than Trading and Code, He Understands Resource Allocation

“I don't need to personally master every detail; I just need to know the principles and goals of implementation, then supervise the team's execution to ensure that the results meet my expectations.”

When venturing into algorithmic trading, many netizens may think that Vida is very skilled in code programming and digital coding. However, as mentioned earlier, Vida is not good at science and does not know much about code. What he is actually good at is resource allocation and continuous optimization of that allocation.

Vida assembled a small team, including programmers and quantitative analysts, to transform his ideas into automated trading strategies. "I am responsible for providing ideas, and the team is responsible for execution. This way, I can focus resources on the most critical areas."

He is unwilling to see himself simply as a trader but prefers to see himself as "Xiang Yu" — an entrepreneur who is both in the thick of battle and skilled in rear command. "As a manager, I don't need to personally write every line of code, but I need to ensure that my trading strategy is accurately implemented."

With this resource allocation ability, in March 2021, Vida officially incorporated quantitative trading into his investment system. He began testing how to integrate macro investment strategies into quantitative algorithms, attempting to use technology to optimize trading efficiency. Initially, his understanding of quant was only theoretical, but through months of practice, the potential of quantitative trading gradually emerged.

By the end of 2021, his quant strategy had helped him gain over 10 million RMB in profits. More importantly, he finally saw the possibility of fully automated trading — transforming trading decisions from "manual mode" to "algorithm-driven" to outpace other market competitors in speed and accuracy.

Vida often openly shares some of his trading strategies on Zhihu because he knows that his moat is not these trading strategies but rather the complexity and execution difficulty of these strategies, which 99.99% of people in the market find hard to replicate.

Millisecond-Level Arbitrage Art

By 2022, Vida had firmly established himself in the market through quantitative trading. However, like every successful entrepreneur, success brought not satisfaction but greater anxiety.

That year, he met a French counterpart who earned millions of dollars using a news trading strategy and then made tens of millions of dollars in a few months through arbitrage trading via a Coinbase technical loophole. This rapid wealth accumulation pattern made Vida feel "both admiring and anxious." He realized that there were people in the market who were faster and more acute than him.

This sense of crisis drove him to continuously optimize his strategy and reaffirmed his rethink of trading philosophy: speed is everything.

"Find ways to know information before others and place buy orders before others. Then, when others want to buy in later, sell to them." Driven by this thinking, he began to focus on news trading and keenly observed that domestic news media usually lagged behind the market pace, which was not conducive to trading.

Therefore, in the first year after graduating from university, Vida launched a crypto media outlet targeting the overseas Chinese market, considering compliance reasons, and only broadcasted on TG, Twitter, and Discord platforms.

“I made money from retail traders' information lag and from market makers whose information channels weren't fast enough to cancel orders in time. Retail traders often rely on those slow news outlets or word-of-mouth in communities for information. Their reaction time to news is often several minutes, so as long as you buy faster than the retail traders, there is profit to be made.” Vida wrote this on Zhihu.

In hindsight, Vida felt that this was one of the wisest decisions he made in 2022, completing a thorough transformation from timing-based trading to fully automated trading. Through automated news trading and latency arbitrage, he elevated his trading speed to a top-tier level in the industry.

That year, the global financial market was sluggish, leaving most investors helpless. However, Vida accurately held a large amount of US dollars and, relying on latency arbitrage and high-frequency strategies on platforms like Binance, successfully grew 8 million to 20 million.

By 2023 and 2024, as the market gradually recovered, Vida's trading model had essentially achieved true automation. His fully automated news trading system could fetch news content and immediately execute trades. Its millisecond-level response speed allowed him to take full advantage during the bull market.

Subsequently, Vida's wealth saw explosive growth, skyrocketing from 30 million to 100 million.

It is hard to imagine that at this point, with a net worth of hundreds of millions, Vida had only graduated from university two or three years ago, still overseeing three main business lines that could be further segmented into more than a dozen sub-business lines.

For his future plans, Vida hopes to grow his assets to over 100 million in 3 years and establish his hedge fund in Singapore or Dubai.

Furthermore, in his long-term vision, Vida displayed more "idealism" and "heroic qualities": he hoped to create a myth similar to Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, possessing immense wealth at a young age, and aimed to document the entire process so that when he grows old, he can slowly recall his youthful vigor and provide a reference for those who aspire to follow his path.

“I probably won't retire within 5 years. If I do retire, I would like to become a marine biologist, just like Cameron, or become a philanthropic YouTuber like MrBeast.” This is how Vida envisions his retired life.

Rejecting Fatalism

“Fate has randomness, but randomness does not mean you cannot control it.” Not believing in fate may be Vida's greatest characteristic.

Whether in high school or college, most of Vida's classmates came from wealthy families during his student days. From that time in the second-generation circle, he often heard a voice: “Some things you have at birth, you have; some things you don’t, you don’t.” Vida strongly opposed this idea and scoffed at it.

At the age of 16, a foreign teacher asked students to write a letter to their future selves. In the letter, Vida wrote, “At 26, I will definitely become a big boss.” He wanted to prove with his own experience that the saying “a noble son is difficult to become a successful man” is a lie.

In Vida's view, pessimistic people think randomness is fate, while optimistic people use randomness to create opportunities: “Good luck will favor those who try enough. The difference often lies in who has created more opportunities for themselves to try.”

Some people believe that the money he earns now is given by God. Vida has a completely different view. “I clearly know where every penny I earn comes from: either from greedy retail investors or from market makers who are not fast enough with information, rather than relying on any elusive trend or heaven-sent meal.”

From October 2022 to October 2024, Vida's live trading probability has always been a very steep straight line, which makes him disbelieve even more in metaphysics, Feng Shui, and predestination; he only believes in himself.

“I make money relying on a combination of knowledge, computer technology, resource coordination and team management, understanding retail investor psychology, and having a large enough capital to manipulate the market in a short period of time.”

“Crypto is the Playground for the Wise”

If you have only less than 100,000 RMB in capital, how should you start?

In Vida's view, the answer is not to dream of getting rich through financial investment but to start with two things:

First, hone a unique skill. Choose a niche field, refine yourself into an expert in this field, and use selling part of your time to exchange for money.

Second, explore the information asymmetry between people. By seizing internet business opportunities to buy and sell goods, or becoming a risk-free arbitrageur between people, fully exploit the profit from information asymmetry.

Over the past 20 years, China's wealthy elite has shifted from the real estate and mining industries to the internet, new energy, and cross-border trade, and in the future, even more new models and industries will emerge. Opportunities are abundant, the key is whether one can be the first to rush forward to seize the opportunity.

And crypto is a new beachhead.

“To news traders, bots, arbitrageurs, market makers, and rebate farmers: if you don't strive in such favorable market conditions, you will regret it in the next four years. Capitalize on the ample liquidity, squeeze out as much USD as possible. Long live the wealth transfer.” This is Vida's latest statement on Twitter.

The crypto market is a playground for the intelligent, and Vida is such an intelligent individual. He does not hide his favoritism towards the crypto industry, as he sees it as a rare stage in the world where smart people can stand out.

“The greatest role of the crypto market is to transfer wealth from 95% of retail investors at the bottom to the 5% elite.” This is how Vida wrote on his Zhihu page.

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